Re: OT: Wow is all I can say...
 

Wow, it sounds like a great devil's advocacy! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: OT: Wow is all I can say...
 

Thermodyne, Ever considered a position in Politics? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

You almost made me feel sympathy for Microsoft, Well, Almost. Close, but No Cigar http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/biggrin.gif

Re: OT: Wow is all I can say...
 

Very true Aiken. Bill Gates, AKA Bill Hellgates AKA Beelzebub Gates.

No but seriously, MS has pulled some nasty tricks on PC users. Fyron summed it up very well; there is just one more thing.

WinME.

It takes all the bugs from Win98 and WinXP and combines them into a pretty much unusable OS.

And for me, being a lifetime Win95/98 user, XP was extremely user-unfriendly..... it was almost like having to re-learn working with the computer from scratch. Take, for instance, sharing a folder; in Win98 you just right-clicked the icon, clicked Share and chose a name for the shared folder, then you're done. When I try to do this in WinXP, it says I have to copy the folder into my PC's SharedDocs folder. WTF?!? I want the folder to simply be shared! Whenever I modify its contents I do NOT want to have to do it twice so that the SharedDocs version is the same as the original!

Microsoft is the worst thing that EVER happened to this planet next to Homo sapiens sapiens.

Re: OT: Wow is all I can say...
 

Thermodyne, I can safely say that that is the longest post I have ever seen. Ever.

Re: OT: Wow is all I can say...
 

Me? No way. But my grandfather was a lawyer, judge, and politician, so perhaps I inherited some of his gift for rhetoric.

The intent was not to make you like MS. I wanted to try to make you take a long look at the position of hating them. Many people just pile on the band wagon, repeat the key points when queried, and never make an informed independent judgment of the position they have taken. If we are going to hate them because of their success, or as many say “greed”, shouldn’t we hate the whole NBA? Most of baseball and the NFL? Every major movie star? They all do more or less the same thing, they all estimate what the market can withstand, then ask for just a little more. There are many better reasons to take a stand against MS and other massive semi monopolies. The way they influence American politics is a pet peeve of mine. But personally, I think it is better to take a position in support of something. Instead of just trying to tear something down, why not use the energy to build something better, and then let nature take its course. If what you create is truly better, it will displace that which you don’t like. Personally, I choose to use MS for my own financial fulfillment, and take every opportunity to offer my influence as to the products that they provide.

Re: OT: Wow is all I can say...
 

Actually, my friend Nolan did not sum it up well at all. He repeated the headline rhetoric that is put forth by the nix community, then failed to support his position with an expanded statement. There are many good things happening with nix, the collaborative effort is worth mention, never has something like this occurred in this industry. But IMHO, unless the nix community applies a sustainable business model to their efforts, some large corporation will reap that majority of the profits down the road.


Win ME is a good system. Sure, it’s not as good as 2K, but it addressed a lot of the problems that remained from Win 95. Problem was that the users did not comprehend the changes, and MS didn’t protect it from unsupported code. MS learned a lot from ME and we cans see these changes in 2K and XP. ME was the first true break from DOS, and as such did not support 16 bit drivers and software not specifically adapted to run in a 32bit environment. So people saw it as the next flavor of 98, and had tons of problems because of drivers and legacy software. How many of you ever bothered to the compatibility lists for ME? From a pure performance standpoint it is the fastest 32bit OS that MS has released to date. Take a look at some of the high end benchmarks that are posted on the net. If you find some guy with a nitrogen cooled CPU putting up marks at 6 or 7 GHz, they are almost always running ME. And until recently, most top video marks were run with ME. This only switched to XP when ME driver support dried up. From personal experience, I have found that ME will do intense work like Seti of Folding at Home faster than 2K or XP. Same hardware, same reference job packets, ME wins every time. The problem with ME was that it allowed the average user to hang him with ease. When they loaded an old Win95 16/32 bit game, it just rolled merrily along until the software called a 16 bit dll, then froze or crashed. Same with drivers, it would allow you to install 16bit Win95 driver with no complaint, the fail to start after the reboot. The problem with Win ME was the failure of MS to realize exactly how much people tinkered with their systems, and their arrogant belief that these same people read directions and compatibility lists.

I still us ME for Win95 upgrades. It’s cheap and runs will on down level hardware with limited memory installed. On an old PII it will out perform 2K by a noticeable margin.

A vast amount of ME problems were caused by users, and today when you try to load that old game on a 2k box, what happens? It won’t let you. When you try to load that old 16 bit sound card driver, what happens? It won’t let you.

So when people say that ME sucks, they are really just stating that ME was too advanced and too user unfriendly for them to use reliably at the time. And if IMHO, MS should have realized this when they beta released it. Whoops, I forgot, they didn’t do that kind of stuff back then, everything was a big secret in the software business during that time. But all things change, now OS’s are beta tested, across several builds before being put on the retail shelf. I think I’m on the 3rd build of beta 64bit Windows now. In the old days they would have released it and then started patching. Things do change for the better.


This just goes to support my post above. Many users resist learning how to use software. And strongly resist adapting to new versions. The problem you are having with shares results from the need to balance security against ease of use(mentioned earlier) and can be altered with ease.

Bold statement! I would hope that it was made in jest. If not, then I think a few hunderd words to expand on the statement would be in order. Some of you guys should use a UNIX terminal for a few weeks. Or try to do some email ala compaq AS300. Before Windows, the average person could not use a computer. I recall this state of the art 8088 we had and there was a huge book chained to the desk. The DEC tech couldn't even run it without looking up command strings. Oh it worked well, never crashed. But it would only do about 16 things and only 1 at a time. That was life before MS.

Re: OT: Wow is all I can say...
 

My statements were rather well informed, most certainly not just jumping on the bandwagon... I was not looking to get into any sort of debate, so I did not post anything further and do not have any plan to do so now.

Re: OT: Wow is all I can say...
 

Shucks, I was looking forward to a good debate with you. Anyone else care to step in?

Re: OT: Wow is all I can say...
 

Perhaps if it wasn't finals week this week... but alas. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/Injured.gif

Re: OT: Wow is all I can say...
 

Check a few (dozen) pages back in the SEV Wishlist. My first post was just over six pages long.